Tag: design narratives

You may be asking what design narratives are and I wouldn’t blame you. They are fictive situations that I put historical figures in to see how they respond.

One of my favorites to date is a diary entry in which I had Peggy Guggenheim shopping for mid-century modern design elements for her Venetian home Palazzo Venier dei Leoni at the Oculus Gallery in the Hyde Park neighborhood of LA. The pièce de résistance that day was Edward Wormley’s La Gondola sofa. This is but one of the vintage pieces sourced by the gallery’s owners Dario Diovisalvi and Tara DeWit that inspired this piece.

As she and I stroll past a rare Akari floor lamp by Isamu Noguchi, Guggenheim’s eyes linger longingly as she tells me, “I’ve finally found a palace of white stone with one of the largest gardens in Venice. In 1910, Louisa, Marchesa Casati, a poetess, had lived in one of the wings, giving fantastic Diaghileff [sic] parties and keeping leopards instead of lions in the garden.” No, it’s not real; I didn’t walk through the Gallery with her but I could imagine it thanks to her autobiography that fleshes out her point of view!